The purpose of these “Good-Time Picture” posts is to show color and/or larger versions of photos which appear in my memoir, RADIO … My Love, My Passion! (If you haven’t read, why not? Not a single person has reported it was a waste of their time or found it boring.)
In the opening pages of my memoir, I discuss the early years of my life, which occurred during the Second World War … and speak of what I knew about the war, which was mostly what impacted my family and me on the home front. One of those was the matter of rations stamps, which the government issued and had to be used in order to purchase certain critical items such as gasoline and food products like meat and sugar.
Ration Book & Stamps 
“My first paying job in radio” is how I describe being hired as the engineer for a weekly remote broadcast from a car dealer showroom by two of the personalities at WTNJ in Trenton, New Jersey. The job was mine if … I were able to provide the missing components. Just so happened I could. Only piece worth anything which the station owned was this Western Electric remote mixer.
The station’s remote turntable was bulky and looked ugly, and didn’t perform much better … so I made up an adapter cable for my RCA 45 RPM changer, in which I had installed a better quality pickup cartridge. For microphones, I had recently acquired and repaired a pair of RCA Model 74B ribbon velocity units. Also needed were two outdoor horn speakers for the roof of the dealership and an amplifier to drive them — my fire department had the speakers and I had the amp. By the way, if you are not familiar with old-time broadcast equipment, the Western Electric mixer’s microphone input jacks required plugs which look like this one.
Jumping from the mid-1950’s to 1970 and New York City, where one day a gentleman shows up at our WRFM 485 Madison Avenue address to tell me that he had a wall that he knew that I would really want. How did he know that this kind of deal would be right up my alley. As you see here, this is what he was talking about … our beautiful Robert Indiana LOVE-inspired call letter logo painted so beautifully on the side of this building, plainly visible to the thousands who regularly drove south on the Major Deegan Expressway in the vicinity of Yankee Stadium.
We did receive a few complaints from residents of the neighborhood, that we were de-facing the community. All I could do was note that something was going to appear on that wall … rather than this “classic piece of attractive art,” they could have been stuck with something far more gross and ugly.
Beyond the distribution and placement of tens of thousands of our FM dial cards, our next advertising campaign was the placement of posters in train and bus stations, carrying through our Begin to Like Radio Again theme.
After thousands of the citizens of the New York region got the message and made the switch to FM or simply turned their FM dial further to the right, landing at 105.1 … and discovering they truly could begin to really like what their radio was again offering, taking WRFM to the upper echelons of the New York radio audience ratings, I was asked to take on a new challenge.
I was really torn over leaving my “baby,” WRFM, even though my programming would continue to be heard on the station — but it wouldn’t be the same. However, my new endeavor under the same Bonneville International Corporation umbrella was to provide the content, the tools and the guidance to six other FM station in order for them to achieve the same success that we were able to bring to WRFM. It was also quickly decided our services would be made available to stations outside of the seven cities where Bonneville-owned stations were located.
This operation was birthed in the middle of the WRFM operation, which was not a practical arrangement going forward. By spring of 1971, we had re-located within the 485 Madison Avenue building and taken on the name, Bonneville Broadcast Consultants. As our list of client stations grew, we needed more staff and more space. Since clients rarely came to visit, there was no reason to remain within the city. Several of us resided in Bergen County, New Jersey, and others were ready to follow, so in 1974 we moved to a new home in Tenafly, New Jersey.
I liked to come in quite early and spend the morning hours several days a week in our “music room,” the record library, searching out new selections to include in new programming that’d be sent out to our ever-growing list of stations across the nation … created for one purpose, to bring joy to the millions who listened to these stations on a daily basis.
Yes, those were the days . . . one’s for the radio history books!
